“Just cream. I’ll get it.” She waved off the idea of him doing anything further for her and moved to search the industrial-sized refrigerator for a carton of anything dairy-like. Simon’s grief was so palpable, the weight of it filled the whole house. She considered sending him back to bed and wondered if Simon and her sister had been the sort of people that might have a leftover prescription bottle of something that might help him sleep. When she returned to her cup with the closest thing she could find to cream, a thin container of nonfat milk, she noticed Clare’s new book on the kitchen table.

“I can’t help but think,” he said when he saw her staring at the book, “that I missed something. Some clue. Some answer to Clare, some reason for why she’d…do this.”

Eileen poured the watery milk into her coffee, glanced at Simon to make sure he wouldn’t object, then picked the book up off the table and brought it over to the island. She held it between her hands and stared down at the cover.

Simon sighed. “I’ve read everything she ever wrote at least ten times. Partly because it’s my job, mostly because I’m her husband, but always because I loved her stories. That book.” He pointed to A Perfect Life in Eileen’s hands. “Something was different. I knew it right from the start. She wouldn’t let me read any of the early drafts, wouldn’t tell me what it was about. She would even stop writing and close her computer if I happened to walk in on her while she was working on it.” Simon stared at the bare marble countertop in front of him, as if some answer to Clare could maybe be deciphered in the randomness of black and gray swirls. “All her other books, except for that first one…she’d never acted like that before. We always consulted, brainstormed. She’d let me read her works in progress so we could discuss direction, theme, the current market, what her fan base expected. But not that book… So I keep thinking, because of what she’s done, that maybe there’s some message, some clue. Something I might have caught in time, if only I’d made her let me read it.”